Electrospun Porous Nanorod Perovskite Oxide/Ionic Conductor Composite As an Electrochemical Catalyst for Water Splitting

As the global energy demand increases rapidly, developments of cost-effective and highly active catalysts are of prime importance for the energy conversion and storage device in the pursuit of sustainable energy, such as the water splitting cells, rechargeable metal–air batteries, and regenerative fuel cells. In these electrochemical energy devices, the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) shows the considerable overpotential owing to the slow kinetics of OER, similar to the sluggish oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells. Noble metal-based catalysts such as RuO₂ and IrO₂ are still used, but the scarcity and high cost of the noble metal-based catalysts limit their wide application. In order to develop highly active, durable, and low-cost OER catalysts, the perovskite structure -based catalysts have been considered because of their highly electrocatalytic activity for the OER. Further, The core/shell-fiber-structure OER catalysts were prepared by the advanced electrospinning and Pechini process. The electrospinning process has various advantages, such as the fast, simple, the direct use of inorganic particles as precursors, to fabricate the inorganic core/shell fibers. Hence, in this work, perovskite structure -based catalysts with the morphology of core/shell-fibers are fabricated for highly effective OER catalysts and characterized by various physicochemical and electrochemical tools.

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Keywords: electrochemical catalysts, electrospinning, Pechini method, Perovskite-based catalyst, Water splitting cells, Oxygen evolution reaction.